


Get These Broken Days Resolved

by MadameReveuse



Series: Star Trek: Reclamation [2]
Category: Star Trek: Picard
Genre: Assassination Attempt(s), Light Angst, M/M, Politics, Radicalization of Hugh, Sex-Work Mention, reclamation, xBs (Star Trek)
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-10-02
Updated: 2020-11-26
Packaged: 2021-03-07 18:09:29
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 17,464
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26761891
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MadameReveuse/pseuds/MadameReveuse
Summary: Starfleet has given Hugh his next large-scale reclamation project. The conditions are better than the Artifact, sure, but not everything is as it seems. As Hugh works to uncover the dark secret of a Federation starship gone missing in the Battle of Wolf 359, Elnor must be on time to prevent the worst.
Relationships: Elnor/Hugh | Third of Five
Series: Star Trek: Reclamation [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1945795
Comments: 7
Kudos: 15





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> The adventure continues! 
> 
> This fic won't make much sense without first having read part 1 of the series, The Art of Scraping Through. It's a lot there, but I promise it is quite good, so go on ahead and click that link!
> 
> Again the title is a song lyric, as will be all the chapter titles. Go listen to the song here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UUyFaIoUFJo
> 
> Now have a cryptic prologue that won't make any sense until much later. TW for discussions of sex work and exploitation thereof, also some violence. If more trigger warnings are needed, please alert me to this.

Picture this with me:

A rain-slicked street. Tall, gray, apathetic walls. Usually, the city was bustling, even at this time of night, with students from the engineering colleges out for a late-night snack at the replimats, researchers from the labs on their breaks, shop workers on the way home from their shifts. This evening, the torrent of rain had driven most everyone inside. A woman huddled close to a storefront for shelter, her coat being made to look fashionable rather than protect her from the elements. Business had been slow for her tonight. Let us perceive her. Most, but by no means all of her cybernetic implants have been chipped away. Do not be fooled by the obvious, clunky metal forearm. It was a non-functioning rubber fake, to appeal to her clientele. It was less heavy and more comfortable than an actual Borg arm, if completely useless. Her clothing had been tailored to – more or less tastefully – showcase such implants as were real. Rhinestones glinted on some of them in the dull, yellow light of a streetlamp. Those strands of her long, dirty-blonde hair that couldn't fit under her flimsy hood were curling with moisture.

She waited.

“Excuse me, ma’am. Are you a real former Borg?”

She suppressed a sigh, and tipped her head up. This was, believe it or not, how many clients approached her. “I am as real as you want me to be.”

She did not say this flirtatiously. Those who searched out her services looked for Borg-like behavior. Cold-eyed superiority, at least in the beginning, until they could get to roleplay at breaking her, or being broken. All depending on the subset of the kink. There were two men on the street corner with her, one slim and wiry, one big and brawny. Two, not one. A sliver of worry was also suppressed.

“These implants the real deal?” asked the big one.

“Oh, yes. All genuine Borg Collective.”

“Good.” The skinny one grinned. “That way you’re worth more.”

A minute recoil. “Excuse me?”

The skinny man drew a knife. “Stay very still now, poppet,” he said, still smirking in anticipation. “That way it’ll be over quickly. Or… more quickly at any rate.”

She ran.

She could not run far in her penny heels, and the men gave chase. Too soon, she found that the alley she ran down was a dead end.

“Stop,” she cried out. “You can’t—I’m a citizen of Cygnis III, I have rights!”

The big man laughed. “You wish, doll.”

It helped that they were deeply vile men.

She screamed.

On cue, a shadow detached from a roof behind the two men, dark on black. What followed next was quick, like a lightning-strike, like divine judgement.

The big man turned around first, towards the dark shape. The throwing knife made a fleshy, squelching sound as it entered his throat. The skinny man drew a phaser, fumbled with the setting for a moment, and it spelled his doom too, that second’s hesitation. A metallic whirr from the dark shape, then a click, an understated hiss, a hand shot up and the skinny man’s knees buckled, a metallic pair of tubules still whirring at an almost inaudibly high pitch as they latched onto his neck. Then they retracted, he went limp all at once, his face hit the floor, and there was silence.

“Well-played,” said the dark shape, as the tubules retracted back into his hand and disappeared as if they'd never existed. “Very convincing. Didn’t get a hit in, did they?”

“No, I’m fine,” the woman replied. “But that whole set-up for two goons?”

The shape shrugged. “A snatcher is a snatcher. These two goons will never lay hands on another xB again.”

A cloak was removed, revealing a pale, humanoid face, a shock of carrot-red hair. One deep-brown eye and a Borg eyepiece, quietly clicking and whirring away, turned from the woman down to the two corpses.

“And where there’s two, there’s more,” the xB said, and begun rifling through their pockets.

“Who pays you for this?” the woman asked.

“Nobody. Snatchers I do pro bono. But you…” He produced a PADD from the big man’s jacket pocket, “shall certainly reap your reward for your assistance tonight.”

Inhumanly fast, he opened, scanned and closed files upon files. The woman heard a beep from her wrist-holo on her unadorned arm. Fumbling off the fake prosthetic, she snapped it open and pulled up her personal credit account, to which a tidy sum had been added.

“This is what he had on him. For tonight’s job, I suppose. There’s more once I get into his bank information.”

“They pay their goons well.”

The red-haired man grinned. “Hazard pay.”

He brought up more files and records, transferring them from the dead man’s PADD to a personal holo-storage device. “This seems to be a communication log with his superiors… it’s encrypted, but I’m sure I’ll crack it.”

The woman opened her pursed, took out a cigarette and lit it. “I can help you.”

“You’ve got… what was your name again?”

“It’s Trinket,” she said.

“You’ve got a talent for decryption, Trinket?”

“Yeah. Believe it or not, I came to Cygnis III to apply for a programmer job. Up at the college, you know. They’re said to be the best outside of Federation central worlds.”

The red-haired man cocked his head. The lens on his ocular implant glinted like green glass in the lamplight. “What… happened, if you don’t mind me asking?”

Trinket shrugged. “Well, they didn’t accept me. Said they can’t risk my Borg tech messing with any of their sensitive software, or whatever. Plain as day they were just afraid. Well, their bad for throwing away an opportunity to avail themselves of some unique talent. Not even the workshops downtown wanted me, and I’d used up all my latinum just getting here and paying my rent. This is pretty much the only job they’ll give an ex-Borg drone on these backwater worlds. Now all the assholes who turned me down come and hit me up after hours for some assimilation-play.” She sniffed disdainfully.

Perhaps catching how she seemed to curl in on herself as she told her story, the red-haired man shifted his weight a bit uncomfortably. “There’s no shame in doing this work,” he said. “Many of us hit up chasers when we’re short on cash. Our Liberator himself used to do this for a while.”

Trinket scratched the implant above her brow. “Who now?”

“Our Liberator,” the man repeated, the capital L clearly audible. “The first xB of them all. Have you not heard of him? Clearly I must bring you up to speed. Is that Tarkalean tea-house still open? Tea on me.”

“I thought you’d be on your way by now,” Trinket remarked, puffing on her cigarette. The job was done, the pay transferred, the interaction ended – surely a hitman-for-hire lead a busy life.

“I… thought this was an effective technique we had here,” the man said. “And I could really use a hand with that encryption. Would… you like to do jobs like this more often?”

Trinket pondered this. She couldn't tell if he was offering her this out of pity. If he wanted to pity her, he was welcome to, if the latinum continued coming in at this rate. He was a fellow xB, plus he had not tried to come on to her once, not even when he'd hired her to play decoy for the drone-snatchers in the first place, and his suggestion of the tea-house rather than a bar seemed to indicate he didn't mean to ply her into compliance. His offer would take her off-world, and it beat half-hearted Borg roleplay.

“We can discuss this over tea,” she decided. The assassin nodded.

Their talk over tea was pleasant enough. His own wrist-holo beeped about twenty minutes into the conversation, alerting him to an incoming message from one of his many influential employers. Rather a lot of organizations had availed themselves of his talents in the interests of the major political players of the four Quadrants in the past. This one… this one was novel. Turning away from Trinket for a moment, the assassin’s eyes scanned the information presented to him; the interested party, the rate, the consequences, should he fail. This particular client kept things close to the chest. This particular client was not to be trifled with. And then, of course, the target.

The target…

The assassin released a slow breath.

Well.

This, he supposed, had been a long time coming. A part of him agreed that it was necessary, though not for the same reasons his employer deemed it so.

He didn't have to like it. He just had to do his job.


	2. One Call, Different Answers

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sooo let's get into this fic proper! Hugh gets his new assignment. Bit cushier than the Artifact, but with new challenges awaiting. If you're wondering where Elnor's at, don't worry, there will be Elnor. Also I ended up loving Naáshala so much I took her here with me
> 
> Ceret Moset, First Vanya and Jimbo Supreme are heroes of their own, separate story, helpfully provided absolutely nowhere :)
> 
> Somehow this got accidentally tagged as a complete work?? Sorry for the mishap, folks. This has many chapters in fact.
> 
> Kudos & comments welcome!!

Once again, and sooner than he would have expected, Hugh found himself back at Starfleet headquarters, being ushered politely into the office of an admiral. Odd, upon thinking about it, that Starfleet dealt with matters of interspecies diplomacy directly, with minimal to no involvement by the Federation civil government…

The man that greeted him from behind an impressive-looking desk seemed like standard admiral material: an older white man with lightening hair, a stern face, keen gray eyes and an impeccably pressed uniform that immediately communicated ex-military rather than ex-diplomat. Well, a man could be both, but Hugh decided to tread with care here nonetheless.

The admiral gave him a curt, but not pointedly unfriendly nod. “Director Hugh,” he said. “Admiral Robert Thorne. You’ve received my communication. Please take a seat.”

Hugh sat down in an uncomfortable chair.

“What can I do for you, Admiral? Your message said you had something for me to look at.”

“Right to the point with you, hm?” The Admiral nodded, apparently in approval of this. “Well then, here it is.”

He swiveled his desk computer around so that Hugh could look at the star-map displayed there. “This is the Colaris system. I’m not sure if you’ve seen it – at high warp, you’d reach it from here in less than a week.” He tapped the image on the screen with a spare stylus from his desk, causing the area around the system’s third planet to magnify. “See the third planet, here. It’s L-class, uninhabited, basically a big chunk of rock. Starfleet is establishing a research outpost in orbit of its second moon as we speak, owing to what popped up there about four weeks ago.”

Admiral Thorne magnified again. In the planet’s orbit, Hugh could spot… something that didn’t quite belong there, yet certainly not the _oddest_ thing he'd ever seen.

“This is a Federation starship,” he said, puzzled.

“An _assimilated_ Federation starship,” Admiral Thorne corrected him. “On Stardate 42506.2, a transwarp conduit appeared in this location for precisely seven minutes, spat out this ship and vanished. Preliminary assessments have confirmed it to be severed from the Borg Collective, drifting. On board is a contingent of what’s estimated to be about 700 inactive drones.”

Hugh blinked. He had to take a moment.

“Do you know this ship?” he asked.

“Oh, yes. It was reported missing in action after the battle of Wolf 359,” Admiral Thorne said. “It’s the NCC-67017. USS Liberator.”

Hugh felt a chill run down his spine.

He ignored it. This had to be a coincidence. “You want me to access this vessel and reclaim the drones?”

“First and foremost, I would like a threat assessment,” Admiral Thorne replied, steepling his fingers. “You will be free to act at your discretion regarding the drones, provided you can establish they aren’t dangerous at present or likely to become so. Starfleet wants to know where this vessel came from, why it got here, and for what purpose these drones and all this Borg technology was left on our doorstep. You may bring any number of Reclamation Project staff you need, provided they’ll be discreet. We don’t want word getting out of a Borg vessel idling this close to Federation member worlds. It’ll upset the populace unduly.”

Hugh raised an eyebrow at that. But it was hardly his place to advise the Starfleet Admiralty on how the Federation should be run. He limited himself to asking, “Surely it will be impossible for all of us to live onboard the… Liberator, was it?”

Admiral Thorne nodded. “Hence why we are providing an orbital research outpost. It will accommodate you, your staff and any supervising Starfleet personnel. This will be a joint Federation-Reclamation Project venture, seeing as this _is_ Federation space. There will be Starfleet personnel posted, but I’m sure you’ll find the commanding officer easy to collaborate with. He’s a… good sort.”

 _A good sort_ could mean… any number of things. Hugh put that thought away for later. It rankled, just being _told_ like that, but Hugh didn’t see any way past that.

“You’re a little off the beaten warp-paths out there, but there is a space station orbiting Colaris VII for your use. Again, we would prefer this whole business to stay quiet. Overt mingling is not encouraged.”

Hugh nodded. He’d have to ask around which Reclamation Project volunteers would be willing to work like that. It couldn’t be worse than the Artifact had been, right?

“Right. May I name a few conditions?”

Thorne lanced an eyebrow back at him in turn. “You can certainly put them up for debate.”

“Before I begin the work, I’d like to get a contract down on paper. And I’d like to be involved in the drafting thereof. No more treaties with a thousand holes and backdoors that allow for my people or myself to be murdered at will. I'm sure you want to avoid a repeat of that whole debacle just as much as I.” Hugh didn't harbor any illusions regarding the value the Federation would ascribe to the prospective new xBs, or in fact himself. But a scene like the one on the Artifact happening again, and in shouting distance to Earth, would look embarrassing. Questions would be asked.

Thorne nodded. “Yes, that is reasonable.”

Hugh took a breath. Now, this was going to be a risky move. He had long debated this with the 407s, and they’d agreed that, for the Reclamation Project’s work to continue, this would be needed.

“Secondly, on that vessel… I get Queen privileges.”

Admiral Thorne took a second to digest that.

“It… will be hard to convince the Federation Council of the necessity of this,” he then said coolly.

“I might not have made myself perfectly clear: I _will not_ have a disaster like the Artifact repeated,” Hugh replied. “You will forgive me if, after all that, and with no Federation reaction to senseless mass-murder, I am wary of handing the executive responsibilities for yet another project off to a third party. On the Artifact, my title of director was, let us admit it, in name only. If I am to work with Starfleet in any capacity again, I want full oversight.”

“And what if Starfleet Command is unwilling to grant that?” Thorne asked, a note of something challenging in his voice. His cold, gray eyes said, _what are you going to do, drone?_

Hugh took another deep breath. He had hoped that it wouldn’t come to this.

“Well, Admiral, as you know, there has been a tactical cube sighted in the Gamma Quadrant. How long would it take you to get people out there? Even if you’re going via the Bajoran wormhole, a week at the very least. A transwarp-capable vessel can transport any number of xBs there and back within two days. And with the strain of individuality I carry, I need only step onto a Borg vessel to effectively become Queen thereof. Within the next business week, the Reclamation Project could have a fully staffed armored tactical cube in orbit of Earth. I’m certain we all remember the battle of Wolf 359.”

Hugh put his hands on the table. “I consider myself a pacifist, and I abhor making threats. But I will not see more of my people come to harm when I could easily prevent it. I appreciate the Federation’s assistance, and I am willing to report to you. But shunt me off to the side again at your own peril. As far as I see it, I am here representing an emerging new species, and I’m the only one looking out for their interests. We all, as xBs, would vastly prefer coming into our own in peaceful collaboration with the Federation. But it has been made… hard for us. You see the position I am in. I’m deeply sorry.”

Thorne’s eyes had widened. He looked at Hugh across his desk as if seeing him clearly for the first time. “So to make this perfectly clear. You’re saying that if you’re not put in charge of the reclamation effort on the vessel we’ve been discussing… you will salvage a Borg cube and take it up against Earth?”

Hugh shrugged, feigning nonchalance. “Guerrilla reclamation is entirely possible. It’s not a method I favor, but… I could have command over a cube’s contingent of drones the day after tomorrow. And yes, I could take them against Earth to… lend gravitas to my - entirely reasonable, might I point out - demands.”

“And what if, knowing this, I call Security and arrest you right now?” Admiral Thorne asked.

“I have friends who are prepared for this very eventuality. Friends who will take action if I don't walk out of here and check in with them.” Six would _enjoy_ taking a tactical cube to menace Earth. Not to attack – Hugh hoped, at least. But to rub it in the Federation’s collective faces how strong they really were.

“You must realize that I could have done this on the Artifact all along,” Hugh said. “The only reason I have not done so is my own strong preference for peace, and my trust in the institution you, Admiral, represent. I know the Federation has the best interest of my people in mind. Or, if you’ll pardon me, else.”

He noticed that the admiral seemed to be eyeing him in a strange way. Abruptly, Hugh realized that strange something in Thorne’s eyes was _respect_. He’d find out later that the man had been in the field for the whole of the Dominion war. Apparently some people could genuinely be reached by shows of force. “I see how it is,” he said. “I will… inform the Federation Council of your terms.”

* * *

They made him wait for a week, probably to give him time to sweat over his threat. Hugh wasn’t too bothered, because it told him they thought he was bluffing and that they could afford to waste this time. But at last, the Council apparently caved and agreed to let Hugh take all the safety precautions he deemed appropriate, up to and including Queendom of the stranded vessel, as long as everything was duly logged and reported to the Starfleet commander. Cal and the other 407s, still back on Coppelius, were meanwhile sticking their heads together and nailing down the contract Hugh had discussed with the Admiral, determined that this time, the project was going to have actual legal protection. This settled, Hugh started making calls to all Reclamation Project members he thought would appreciate an exciting new challenge. He had no intention of heading in there alone surrounded by Starfleet security goons; as for any large-scale reclamation effort, he needed his staff with him. It was settled that they would arrive soon after his initial in-person sighting and assessment of the project site. So Hugh acquired the original schematics of the ship in question from the relevant Starfleet database and began familiarizing himself with them as he planned and organized and waited.

Then at last, there was no more waiting.

Admiral Thorne debriefed him one last time, before handing him over to a couple of Starfleet personnel with lieutenant’s pips gleaming on their neatly pressed uniforms and the carefully neutral look on their faces of military officers everywhere carrying out an assignment they either had no or by far too many opinions about. Hugh, wearing his one nice jacket, decided to make himself unobtrusive and not get in the way of the Starfleets piloting the shuttlecraft that was to take them to the project-site. He fielded the standard five minutes of stilted small-talk, then, as soon as was socially acceptable, put earbuds in. The relief from all parties no longer forced to communicate was palpable. It seemed, Hugh discovered as he pulled up a PADD, Six had seen fit to drop his new album of Earth Classic covers into his musical database. A gift very characteristic of Six. Settling down in the back of the shuttle, Hugh explored this as Earth zipped out of view.

_Here we are, we’re princes of the universe…_

_…oh I, I wanna start a revolution…_

_…we are the light, we are the life, we are the envy of the gods above…_

_…I am your main man if you’re looking for trouble, I take no lip no one’s tougher than me…_

It was all very… Six, although Hugh doubted his voice could hold up to Freddie Mercury. Perhaps these singers Six was imitating had genuinely felt as confident as their lyrics. With Six it was bravado mingling with uncertainty mingling with stubbornness, and it made Hugh feel immeasurably fond.

The shuttle docked first at the little trading hub in orbit of Colaris VII. Hugh liked a space station: each one was different, even the Starfleet-run ones eventually got swept up in the gentle blend of the cultures and habits of the people on the surrounding worlds who used the place to conduct business. Usually, on the busier ones, there was a steady bustle of aliens from all over the quadrants, and even an xB didn’t attract immediate notice. Here he could amble among shops and stalls, people-watch and maybe find some nice little trinket or something of the sort to send to Elnor as a souvenir. He lingered at a pet shop and at a stall that sold ornate little beads made from many materials that could be braided into one’s hair, wondering if Elnor would like that. He took several pictures to show to Elnor in their next subspace conversation, especially of the many and varied animals on sale in the pet shop. Following that, there was just enough time to get lunch at a Bajoran place until he was to meet his Federation liaison.

The Commander he ended up meeting was a tall, slightly lanky man somewhere vaguely in his thirties. His face appeared sharp and angular, all pointy chin and high cheekbones, topped off by a light dusting of brownish-blonde hair, a commanding face at first glance, if slightly offset by a somewhat milky look to his blue eyes. Light, thin, vague, such was Hugh’s first impression, a weak handshake, a reedy voice and an unreal smile.

“Commander Stephen Thorne, nice to meet you,” the Commander said and sat down at the table where Hugh, five minutes prior, had been having his Hasperat. (The same name as the Admiral, Hugh thought, and filed the thought away for later.) Seeming to want to avoid overt contact of his pristine uniform with the somewhat greasy tabletop, Thorne fluttered his hands for a second until settling them in his lap. “The Colaris III orbital research base is… happy to have your collaboration.”

“Pleasure’s all mine,” Hugh replied. “I’m glad to get to be here.”

“Did… you have a good trip here?” The Commander seemed nervous somehow, asking this completely ordinary question. Hugh suspected the man hadn’t ever actually spoken to an xB before, and was having all sorts of wild expectations and assumptions either reaffirmed or debunked right now. Hugh was an old hand at people like that by now.

“Oh yes, no complications or anything, very smooth ride. Those Starfleet shuttles, top of the line, commendable. You know, a friend of mine used to design those. How about yourself, did you get here okay? Was it far from the research base?” Hugh stifled a grin as he effortlessly spun the Commander into a web of small-talk.

He bided his time as he let his mouth run for a couple of minutes about the space station, the sights he’d seen, the quality of the jumja sticks at the Bajoran diner, his weekend plans… until,

“I must say, you’re very… personable, um, for a drone.”

_Theeeere we are._

Hugh gave the man a smile. “Please, ex-drone. I’ve been out of the Borg for thirty years now, longer than I was _in_ , as a matter of fact. But I fancy myself having learned a lot about how to talk like a person, and I do need it for my job.”

“Ah, yes, as, um, a politician.”

Hugh let that remark pass with nary a blink. It still sat weirdly, to be referred to as that. His wish to see his people living and thriving – the very basics, now – should not translate into politics, he felt.

“I have been warned… advised that your presence might be considered polarizing, but… I’m certain we can look beyond this, and just get the work done. In the true Starfleet spirit of collaboration and exploration, that overlooks our, um, our many differences.”

“Sure,” Hugh said, whilst thinking, _What a bag of hot air._ Commander Thorne was meant to escort him, but he thought it prudent to get up now, with a smile and an inviting wave. “Shall we get going? I’m eager to see what I’m dealing with.”

Gratefully, the Commander took the cue and followed. “Yes, let’s get to work.”

* * *

There was yet another shuttle docked at the station that would take them to the orbital research base, piloted by yet another Starfleet uniform. This time the trip took barely an hour. Hugh spent most of the time in his window seat attempting to lounge nonchalantly, when really he wished to be glued to the window straining his eyes for the first glimpse of his new workplace peeling into view out of the velvety darkness of space. Perhaps that level of anticipation was inappropriate – reclamation was serious business. But he couldn’t help looking forward to the work – to meeting new xBs, helping them into the world.

He saw the research base first – a small, barebones space station, much smaller than the trading hub in orbit of Colaris VII. It seemed to be the standard Starfleet model, but with no obvious hull markers designating it as such. Starfleet was here discreetly. There was only room for five ships, counting runabouts, to dock at once.

Inside, the station was bright, and businesslike, and half-empty. The Reclamation Project volunteers were yet to arrive, so everyone apart from Hugh was in Starfleet uniform. The Commander gave him the tour. All over the installation, Starfleet personnel were milling about, setting up workstations, the labs, the sickbay, the central OPs. The officers conducted themselves, as far as Hugh could see, with a professional determination that put him in mind, if the overall color scheme were somewhat darker, of Mother Collective. It was admirable to watch the Starfleets at work, and nice to know he was surrounded by consummate professionals, but Hugh couldn’t wait for the Reclamation Project staff to get here and mix the place up a little.

In the station’s observation lounge, he peered through the large, sloping window and finally saw it: the USS Liberator, his objective.

It was an Excelsior-class starship, the hull in places glimmering green where parts of it had been subsumed in the assimilation process. They were wide swathes of green. Hugh assumed that most of the ship, on the inside, had been taken over by Borg technology. Still, this was odd. Usually, assimilated vessels were immediately dismantled for parts, the crew integrated into the drone contingent of whatever cube had engaged said vessel first. In this case, the ship had been left intact, the crew, now drones, still on it…

Strange.

Maybe something had gone wrong? Or maybe this ship was supposed to be this way. Perhaps it had been meant to serve as bait? Lie in wait until someone else attempted to investigate it, and then strike?

But the Borg usually had no need of such subtlety. They saw something worth assimilating, they sent a cube, they snatched it up. But that tactic hadn’t gotten them anywhere in their attempts on Earth. Maybe they were trying something new? Hugh made a mental note of it.

Sometimes he felt like he was engaged in a pitched battle of wills with the Borg Queen, and she had just thrown him another curveball. But there had to be more to it; the universe – or the Collective – didn’t revolve around him.

The rest of the day was spent meeting the senior Starfleet officers Hugh and his staff would be working with – the chief medical officer, the head of security, the heads of half a dozen different science teams, and notably a diplomatic liaison, apart from the Commander himself. They had dinner together in the Commander’s quarters, and then there was nothing for Hugh to do but rest and wait for his staff to start trickling in.

When they arrived, there was a surprise for Hugh: none else but Naáshala, grinning at him and going right in for the hug.

“I thought you were on Coppelius,” Hugh said.

“I _was_ ,” Naáshala answered, still smiling, “but I think I’m ready for a new challenge. Your friend Ada and Doctor Crusher and Ramdha have the Artifact well in hand anyway. I’m not trying to spend the rest of my career on one planet!”

“It’s good to have you here,” Hugh said. “Have you brought anyone else from the Artifact?”

More than a dozen other researchers from the Artifact had come with Naáshala. Many had stayed behind on Coppelius, some, well, some had simply vanished as soon as Coppelius had become cleared for space travel. Hugh couldn’t say he blamed them; the circumstances leading to them being there had been chaotic, not to mention traumatizing, and no one had started the project prepared to crash onto the planet in the first place. There were more volunteers from other Reclamation Project hot spots, some directly from the First Settlement that Lore, so many years ago, had led them to. They all had to be settled now, to be situated in new quarters and then familiarized with the station and their Federation colleagues. Then duty rosters had to be drawn up, taskforces formed, briefings held, and following that, hopefully, they could chance a first look at the objective.

Hugh spent the spare time that he got that evening unpacking his things and furnishing his new quarters. Originally, they were equipped with bare essentials only: a bed, a dresser, a small desk and chair, a food replicator built into a wall. As always when he moved somewhere new, Hugh gave himself a budget of replicator credits to attain everything else he needed. Most of it was spent on a regeneration alcove that he, even after years of sleeping normally, still occasionally needed to maintain his implants and refresh his nanoprobes. But when he’d gotten all his furniture, there was still a small amount of units left, just enough to splurge on one superfluous indulgence.

What would he get?

Ezri’s voice resounded in his mind, telling him that doing little things as treats for himself without a higher purpose was okay. She would tell him to simply get some item that would make him happy, that would make his quarters nice to come home to at the end of the day. Maybe something he’d wanted in the past but hadn’t had the space or money for. Hugh remembered the trading station orbiting Colaris III, and the pet shop he had visited.

He consulted his units again. Yes, by a stroke of luck, he had just enough left to replicate a nice, spacious tank for a fish.

He had to wait until the next morning to take a shuttle back to the station and acquire an inhabitant for his new tank. He picked a black betta fish and carried it home. Set inside its new habitat, the fish seemed as happy as a fish could be. Curious, Hugh stuck his fingertip into the tank and watched as, immediately, the betta veered in and bumped it with its mouth, probably mistaking it for a piece of food. Its repeated attempts to attack and consume his finger looked almost aggressive, and Hugh chuckled.

“Queenie,” he said. “Your name is Queenie.”

And if he felt, somewhere far away, the actual Borg Queen grumble in annoyance, well, surely he was only imagining that.

* * *

Even after all these years, it felt weird donning a Starfleet-issue spacesuit. Once, as a drone, Hugh had been able to survive in the vacuum of space simply as he was, but that had been a long time ago, and most of the relevant technology making this possible had been strip-mined from him. The spacesuit still felt unwieldy compared to his exoplating from back then. That had been clunky as well, true, permitting the drones only slow, lumbering movements, but it had been a part of him, like a natural chitin encasing his body.

“Restoring life support will be your first priority once you enter the Liberator,” the Commander lectured, once more for the road. They’d been over all this in the previous night’s briefing, and Hugh’s team, most of them seasoned xBs themselves, knew the procedure well enough. “This established, you will take inventory of the whole vessel and compare with the preliminary assessment the xenobiology department conducted from orbit: drone contingent, assimilated technology, anything of note that catches your eye. I expect a full report upon your return.”

The Commander would not be coming with them. How odd, Hugh thought, the Starfleet officers he knew would not let rank nor responsibility deter them from jumping recklessly into action.

They stepped on the transporter pads, and almost immediately rematerialized on what had been the Liberator’s bridge. The gravity was not working, and neither was life support. It was dark, save for the green glimmer of inactive Borg technology.

No drones nor their alcoves were kept here, but it still didn’t look anything like a Starfleet bridge anymore. What had once been the central point of a starship had been relegated to a minor maintenance station. Of course, the Borg had no need for a command center. And even if there were one, it would not be here.

Hugh activated his grav boots and turned to his little team. He didn’t like giving orders to his xBs, so he phrased them as polite suggestions. “Ceret and First, can you stay here and see if you can get life support and gravity back online? Internal sensors too. The rest of us can come with me to Engineering.”

The turbolift was not working either, necessitating a slower journey through the bowels of the ship. As he headed for the nearest Jeffries tube, Hugh looked back and saw First Vanya and Ceret, one half-human-half-Bajoran and one Cardassian xB, make finger guns at each other as they set to work. He smiled. Weird, how xB-ness sometimes brought people together.

The team brought up the ship’s schematics they’d been given back at the starbase on their portable holos, to use as a map to find their way around. Descending ladders and crawling through Jeffries tubes, Hugh tapped his brand-new, sparkling Starfleet commbadge as a chirping sound informed him that he was being contacted: mission command was checking in.

“Command to Away Team, what’s your status?” the Commander’s voice came tinny and crackling through the little commlink.

“We are between decks eight and seven, on our way to Engineering,” Hugh reported. “As of yet, we have encountered no drones, awake _or_ asleep. Most systems here seem to be dormant. We’re working on reestablishing life support and artificial gravity and – hold on a second.” Hugh tapped his commbadge again. “First, Ceret, how far along are you with life support?”

“Almost ready here, director,” First Vanya replied. “Ceret is working his scaly little claws off, aren’t you, Ceret?”

“I’m getting there, don’t rush me,” Ceret muttered almost indistinctly.

Hugh reconnected with the Commander. “Life support should be up any minute now.”

“Can you see… have you encountered anything… threatening?” came the reply.

Hugh peered down the Jeffries tube. Sure, it looked a bit creepy in the green Borg-ish light. Then again, entering these assimilated spaces always brought on a strange miasma of emotions in him. Because certainly there were traumatic memories associated with such spaces. They would never go away, and never quite stop being frightening. But on the other hand… the walls lined with gently blinking alcoves encased him like the walls of a childhood home, the warm humid atmosphere swaddled him like a blanket he might have had as a baby. He never figured out why Borg vessels needed to be warm and humid, but they were. That smell like dusty computers was more real to him than that of the actual mother he’d been snatched from, so long ago. Hugh had been assimilated at somewhere around three years old. His earliest memories were of the Borg. This had helped him cope with the Artifact, to wrap the place around himself like a comfortable coat, but it wasn’t something he liked to talk about.

“I did say we encountered no hostiles,” Hugh told the Commander. “No drones at all yet. I would have reported in, had that been the case.”

“Right, right.” The Commander sounded nervous. “Of course. Um. Keep me abreast of any developments.”

“Maybe you could send someone to find their sickbay,” a third voice intervened. “It’ll be so much easier starting the reclamations off if we have a triage center directly on the ship.”

“Who is this?” Now a hysterical note was creeping into the Commander’s voice. “Who’s on the line?!”

“Um, Naáshala Kunamadéstifee, sir, with the Reclamation Project. I took the liberty of patching myself in, sorry, sir.”

“Well, don’t do it again without the appropriate authorization,” the Commander snapped.

“It’s a good idea, though,” Hugh said. “Aural and… Jim, can you go find the sickbay?”

One of the young xBs swiveled around to face Hugh, his expression beyond the panel of his suit expressing utmost betrayal. “Director! My name is Jimbo Supreme and I will be addressed as such.”

Hugh groaned. The kid changed his name every other month. “Why are you the way that you are?”

Jimbo Supreme grinned. “Specifically to spite you.”

“Can we get back to work?” the Commander asked tartly.

“Of course,” Hugh said, in the confines of his mind adding, _priss_.

In the confines of his mind with him, several xBs giggled.

He consulted his holographic map of the ship again, and led the remainders of his team down yet another ladder, into yet another maintenance tunnel, steadily closer to Engineering.

* * *

There were alcoves lining the walls in Engineering, every single one of them housing an inactive drone inside. The warp core was off and, by the looks of it, hadn’t been turned on in a while. It had been remodeled for transwarp capability, and was, of course, glowing green now. Right in the middle of the room there was a Queencell alcove – vacant. If the Queen had ever been here, she was not now.

Hugh cocked his head at it. “I might have to interface.”

It got the appropriately dramatic reaction from the rest of the away team. Over the comm, the Commander spluttered, “I’m sorry, what?”

“I was granted authorization to interface with any Queencell technology I find, which you were most certainly briefed about,” Hugh said mildly as he approached the Queen-alcove. “I will not perform a complete interface at this point, just use the access port here to gauge any changes the Borg made to this vessel. It’ll be much more convenient and less dangerous than searching the entire ship in person.”

One of the engineering stations had been converted into a control panel for the Queen. Of course, the Borg Queen would choose Engineering as her center of control much rather than the bridge. There was a comparatively large number of drones left here – some kind of Queen’s guard? Hugh calmly began sorting through the thicket of cables that descended from the ceiling through the console, hoping to find out what was what and what would correspond to the port at the small of his back.

“But… do you know what you’re doing there, man?” the Commander’s tinny voice demanded.

“Certainly,” Hugh attempted to pacify. “I’ve seen all this before, in the Collective and out. I will be fine. The Borg are not too dissimilar to bees, you see: every drone can become a Queen.”

To distract them as he sifted through the cables, Hugh asked, “Say, sir, are you in any way related to the Admiral Thorne who brought me onto this project back on Earth?”

He heard the Commander clear his throat. “He is my father. Why?”

To himself, Hugh said, _Ah_. So even Starfleet wasn’t immune to good old-fashioned nepotism. It sort of explained how such a little tit as Stephen Thorne had landed a posting such as this one. 

“No reason,” he said. “Ah, here it is.”

He sent a thought the away team’s way to assuage their worries. Really, this would be a walk in the park. The ship and its drones were asleep, and a superficial connection via this one port would allow Hugh to sneak himself in unheeded. The greatest risk here was to the sleeping drones, not to him. If one of them woke up by accident and interfaced with him, they would automatically attempt to download the contents of his cortical node to theirs. Hugh couldn’t be reassimilated, but direct contact with him tended to send any and all drones straight into cold turkey reclamation, which he deemed cruel and unnecessary. The goal wasn’t to infect people with his freewill. It was to take them gently by the hand and watch over them as they gradually recovered it themselves.

Finally, in this moment, the artificial gravity returned. Hugh commed Ceret and First for confirmation that life support was also back on, which allowed the away team to peel out of their spacesuits. With one last comforting nod and smile at the team and ignoring Commander Thorne’s protests, Hugh swiftly cabled up.

Reentering Collective tech was always a jolt to the entire system, not so much jarring like a pulse of electricity but a cold and sudden gasping shock akin to jumping into freezing water. Interfacing as Queen would never compare to being linked into the gigantic hive of drones as just a simple scout. Hugh felt the ship thrum around him, understood its workings, but he himself remained above and apart. He was tapping into a dormant remnant of the Borg, but throughout this, he was still Hugh.

The drones, he saw, were being kept alive and sleeping in their alcoves, each of them feeding off a circuit of energy severed from the Starfleet-installed general life-support system. About half of the Engineering consoles had been reconfigured to run the alcoves here and throughout the ship. Even with warp and transwarp powered down, this had remained running, powering not only the alcoves and Queencell but also—

Hugh yanked the cable from his back (a second of vertigo and disorientation) and slapped his commbadge with a vengeance.

“Commander Thorne.”

“Director?”

“I was told upon coming here that preliminary assessments of the ship’s drones and systems had been performed. By a Starfleet crew under your oversight, is that not right?”

“Well… yes?”

_“So why has no one told me there were maturation chambers here?”_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Lordt when I was trawling Memory Alpha for inspo and found out that there was a ship called the Liberator at Wolf 359. I swear I gave Hugh that nickname/honorific before I knew that. I was like HOLY SHIT everything is coming together
> 
> Borg vessels are canonically warm and humid. Makes no sense to me but here we are.


	3. And Strangers Were Our Future Friends

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hugh begins his work. Soon he will discover that everything's not as it seems here.
> 
> There's a sex scene.
> 
> A couple people were asking me if I would bring back one of my OCs, and I was so flattered that I had to!
> 
> And yes, there were children at the battle of Wolf 359, unfortunately, in canon. Jake Sisko is one example.

“But what difference does it make if they’re there or not?”

Hugh suppressed a sigh. He’d taken the away team back to the space station, seeing as, with their recent discovery, every last one of the plans they had made for this project had been rendered void. Now they were sitting in a conference room and this... astounding personality of a commanding officer was trying to brush it off like it wouldn’t be a big deal to handle, clearly not knowing what in all the stars he was even talking about, but desperate to cover up his blunder.

“Commander, do you know what a Borg maturation facility is?”

“Ah… er, well…”

Clearly not, then. Hugh willed himself to be calm and began to explain. “The Borg assimilate species, not people. Right? But in every population they subsume there are obviously a great many members who are unfit to become fully matured drones right away.”

He was met with a blank look.

“Children,” Naáshala threw in. “He means children.”

“Thank you, Naáshala. So what the Borg do is they put the children in great big maturation tanks where their growth is accelerated and the implants are gradually integrated into their bodies as they grow. For example, I was assimilated as a toddler. Within a few years, I was aged up to a young adult. Of course, it’s only the body that matures. Social and emotional development are completely halted, seeing as the Borg don’t need it. If you deassimilate a maturation tank drone, you get a grownup body with the emotional intelligence and interpersonal skills of a child. Which is a huge and sticky can of worms that’s never easy to open, but it is what it is.”

“And… okay. So we have those tanks here?” Commander Thorne asked.

“Yeah. It’s going to be impossible to know for certain until we’ve cracked those open and consulted a passenger manifest, but I’m going to assume it’s the children of the crew.”

“Wait, wait.” Naáshala got up out of her seat. “You’re trying to tell me there were _children_ at the battle of Wolf 359?”

Hugh frowned. “Unfortunately so. They just threw all ships they had nearby at that cube, some of which had families aboard. They weren’t prepared for battle. Starfleet crews in peaceful times take civilians along on their ships. There were kids on the Enterprise, the Saratoga… maybe the Liberator also. Would that be right for an Excelsior class?”

“I’m… not sure,” Commander Thorne said. “I’d have to consult… um… look, I’m not informed about the specifics of the crew manifest on every single class of Starfleet ship.”

A member of his own command team, a redheaded woman in a science uniform looking to be about her late twenties or early thirties, seemed to take pity on her commanding officer. “It’s quite common for a ship of that size.”

Thorne spared her a brief nod. “Lieutenant Quinn.”

“So yeah, basically now we have to shift our whole approach,” Hugh said.

“Surely you can handle it.” Thorne straightened his back, attempting to look imperiously down his nose at Hugh. Hugh countered with his own blank look.

“All due respect, sir, kids must take priority. The longer we leave them in there, the more the maturation process is going to mess with their natural development. They might still have families out there. And this facility is not at all prepared to reclaim children. Children need adult supervision, caretaking, entertainment, education, and requisitioning these things takes time, which we would have had, if _someone_ had done a proper preliminary report.”

By now, Commander Thorne was starting to look flushed. “Listen, I was not about to expose my personnel to a potentially life-threatening situation…”

“But it was fine to send a team of xBs in, because we’re second-class citizens.”

A fraction of a second after Hugh heard himself say these words, he recognized that he was going to have to discuss them with Ezri on their next subspace therapy session. Why on Earth had he said that? For a moment, there was a very loud silence.

Hugh sighed and pinched the bridge of his nose. “Look, I apologize. Things have been getting kind of heated in here and we can do better than that. But you’ve got to realize that, if anything, we’re in more danger in there than you.”

“I… fail to understand how that’s the case. After all, you are… you’ve _been_ Borg.”

“And thus you’d think we’d do well amongst our own? Commander, we know from past experience that the drones ignore intruders until they present an active threat. Your crew would have been fine in there even if all the drones were awake, which they aren’t. But the Borg Queen considers me an enemy of the state; if an active drone clocks me, it’s instructed to shoot on sight.”

It wasn’t a fact they advertised to never-Bs, but if they were to collaborate here, Hugh figured he would have had to explain it sooner or later. Now, he saw the Starfleets at the table raise their heads in sudden interest. Lieutenant Quinn, who had been taking minutes on her PADD, looked up, stylus poised. “Why is that, do you think?”

Hugh shrugged. “Well, last we know, it’s unsure whether the Queen wants to kill me or drag me back to the Unicomplex for study, to find out what allows me to evade reassimilation. The latter if she’s smart. Thus far they consider me and any xBs rehabilitated by me a threat to Collective stability. But can we circle back to this later, and focus on the issue at hand?”

If things went Hugh’s way, the circling back would preferable occur around about Saint Never’s Day. There was a very good reason why he was dispensing information about the whole Liberator (referring, in this case, to himself rather than the ship) thing to his Starfleet allies on a need-to-know basis. If word got around about Guerrilla reclamation as a concept, he knew in his bones that people would race to exploit that. The last he wanted for himself or any xBs he’d helped reclaim was unscrupulous individuals setting them onto Borg cubes for their own ends.

“So what do you propose we _do_ about those children?” Commander Thorne asked.

Well, Hugh had told him the truth. It was best to get them out of the maturation chambers sooner rather than later. That way, the damage that the Borg had done would be easier to fix. Besides which, leaving those kids in those vats when it was in their power to free them right now was a horrible thing to even be considering.

Hugh steepled his fingers. Internally, he heaved a giant sigh. “Well, Commander, until the appropriate resourced can get here… I guess we’ll find out just how good we all are at babysitting.”

* * *

It was never easy entering a maturation chamber. In all his time outside of the Borg, Hugh luckily had never seen an occupied one until now, and for that he was grateful. Just seeing the empty tanks in the past had made him feel a visceral sense of wrongness, because he’d always known what these contraptions were for, and somehow the boundless violence the Borg enacted against everything in their path took on an extra level of monstrosity when it was done to children. He himself might have grown up like that, without his conscious input or even knowledge of how not-right it was, but he would be the last person to argue that this was any way to raise somebody, or that he’d “turned out fine” as a result of it.

Now, seeing the big maturation vats active and with bodies floating inside the murky liquid was among the worst things to be seeing. These bodies appeared to be in several different stages of maturation: early teens with most of the base layer of exoplating almost completely installed, little tiny ones with minimal augmentations… and that was strange. The battle of Wolf 359 had happened decades ago. Why had they not matured? Had they been kept in stasis here for all this time? Why?

Hugh’s musings were interrupted by the Reclamation Project medical team joining the scene with tricorders, checking the tanks to ascertain whether they would be safe to open without endangering the children. One of them stepped up to the console that seemed to have been used to monitor the tanks and connect them to a power source. Hugh watched as they ejected their tubules and assimilated it, still an efficient way to gather data. Meanwhile, a Starfleet team was standing by in the Liberator’s sickbay, which was being brought back up to Starfleet specs.

If the medical team found anything wrong with the maturation chambers, they’d call in the engineers. Once they took care of any issues that might come up, those tanks would open, and then they’d have kids around.

“I’ve never interacted much with children,” Hugh confided in Elnor that evening on their nightly subspace call. “I have no idea what’s going to happen now.”

“Aren’t all xBs you reclaim, in a way, akin to your children?” Elnor asked – a horrifying thought.

“That’s a horrifying thought,” Hugh said. “And they’re not. I’m not sure where people started getting this notion of me as some kind of patriarch. Anyway, this is different. If we’d known we would be reclaiming children, we would have brought in… well, childcare providers. Nannies, teachers, specialized doctors and nurses. No one here fits those criteria. Besides, a Borg vessel is no place for anyone to spend their childhood.”

“I know you did,” Elnor said. “And so did Seven of Nine, didn’t she?”

“Which wasn’t ideal for any of us,” Hugh pointed out. “The Borg Queen wasn’t exactly what you’d call the perfect mother.”

Still, Hugh thought, Elnor was right in that he should at least talk to Seven. She often had useful input, even if she didn’t get involved with reclamation itself.

But there would be time to call her tomorrow. There would be time to call many people tomorrow. This evening was Elnor Time.

“I’m certain you’ll do well regardless,” Elnor said now. “You’re very nurturing by nature.”

Hugh felt himself blush. Nurturing, really? “I’m… just trying to do my best.”

Elnor nodded. “And it will be enough.”

How assured he seemed of this! How solid in his certainty.

“You’re sure of this?” Hugh asked.

“Very sure.” For a moment, it looked like Elnor was going to reach out for the viewscreen in a doomed attempt to hold Hugh’s hand, as if he’d momentarily forgotten the distance that separated them. He put his hand down and added, “But if you ever need any help, I will be happy to come there.”

“Thank you.” Hugh smiled at him. “I appreciate that, but I’m not sure if and how often you’ll be able to visit. Starfleet’s probably not going to want to let any civilians enter their secret project site.”

This made Elnor frown. “Was it not the same way on the Artifact?” he asked. “I would have thought Starfleet would be better than the Tal Shiar.”

“It’s not the same at all,” Hugh said, wondering for a moment if he was trying to pacify Elnor or his own doubts. But it was already different; he was making it different. “This time I won’t allow it to get that bad again. If they try to harm my people again in any way, they’ll feel the consequences.”

“So when you begin reclaiming the drones, what will happen to them?” Elnor asked.

Hugh sighed, because it was a very good question. “That’s a fight for another day,” he said. “But enough about me. What have you been up to?”

For the rest of the evening, all he wanted to do was listen to Elnor’s anecdotes and feel at peace.

* * *

The medical team, led by the Starfleet-issued station CMO Doctor T’Lar, had brought the Liberator’s sickbay back online and to ship-shape by the following morning, which meant they could begin proceedings. Hugh watched on the security camera’s live-feed from afar as they opened the tanks and cautiously, carefully lifted the kids out.

There were not all that many of them: two teenagers, two kindergarten-aged girls, a boy looking to be about seven or eight, and an infant. The smaller they were, Hugh reckoned, the likelier they were to provide… unique challenges, and he didn’t mean the little baby implants. Those were coming off, at least those that weren’t already essential to the children’s health.

Hugh watched as Doctor T’Lar straightened her spine, seeming to muster all her Vulcan equilibrium, picked a hypospray up off a surgical tray and handed it to one of her assistants. “Very well,” she said. “Wake the infant first.”

The baby woke slowly at first, as if reluctant, but soon started fussing and squalling, tiny fists ineffectually mashing at nothing in confusion. One of the Starfleet nurses picked the baby up and soothed it while T’Lar scanned it with her tricorder. Initial health check complete, T’Lar began testing the baby’s reflexes, instructing the nurse to begin compiling a medical file and cross-checking it with the Liberator’s old crew manifest at the nearest opportunity. When the nurse moved on to measuring and weighing the baby, dictating to another one holding a PADD, T’Lar nodded at them and moved on. She selected a second hypospray.

“Initializing revival of patient number two, juvenile human female, five years old,” she announced for the recording.

Hugh reckoned he ought to be there in person for the children waking up. It wasn’t strictly speaking his responsibility as director, he had no expertise to offer that the xBs on the medical team didn’t also possess, but… he was the Queen of this vessel. The children were xBs now, which made them his responsibility. He ought to be there to welcome the newest members into his community. He could offer a friendly face and a few soothing words to those of them who were old enough to realize that something had happened to them.

So, when the little human girl opened her eyes, Hugh was in sickbay. The girl seemed disturbed by waking up in a hospital bed in an unfamiliar place, with unfamiliar adults looking down on her, and tried as best she could to curl in on herself. She looked pitiful with her thin limbs and shorn head and Borg exoplating under her hospital gown.

“Please stay still,” T’Lar told her with that Vulcan bedside manner. “You are in no danger here. We are only trying to make sure you are alright. We must assess your vitals now that you’re awake.”

“What… who…?” the girl whispered. She didn’t have that reverberating quality to her voice yet that adult drones had.

Hugh squatted by the biobed to bring himself closer to the girl’s face-level. He figured getting stared down upon by a bunch of grownups she did not know had to exacerbate her fear and disorientation. “Hey,” he said softly. “I’m Hugh. You don’t have to be afraid, these people here just want to check if you’re okay. They’re Starfleet.” He figured the girl was old enough to have heard of Starfleet, and human enough that the thought of being in Starfleet’s hands would put her at ease. Surely her maturation process in the Borg vat hadn’t progressed far enough for the hive to mess around with her mind in any grievous way.

“Third of Five,” the girl whispered.

Ahhhh, shit.

“I like ‘Hugh’ better,” Hugh said. “Do you have a name?”

The girl looked at him, uncomprehending, curling up tighter on her biobed. Eventually, she lowered her eyes and shook her head.

Well. It couldn’t be expected that they’d bounce back that much faster for being kids, for spending less time in the Collective as full-grown drones. Reclamation was a step-by-step process.

Hugh didn’t let his face show it, but inside he seethed at the Borg Queen, for doing this to the tiny, fragile human in front of him. He knew this had happened to trillions of children all over the galaxy.

“Director,” T’Lar said, “patient number three is waking up. The Ktarian girl.”

Hugh turned around to observe.

The second girl sat up slowly, reaching out with limbs shaky from inactivity to clutch the blanket she’d been issued to her chest. Large brown eyes scanned the room in silent appraisal. Hugh decided to try again with her.

“Hi,” he said in his calmest voice. “How are you feeling?”

“We are…” The girl paused, blinking, shifting under her blanket to draw her knees up against her chest. “We are functional. But… we cannot hear the voices anymore.”

The Collective-enforced plural sounded eerie enough coming from adult drones. But to hear it in that kid’s quiet, whispering lilt… Hugh suppressed a shudder.

“Yeah, the voices are gone, but it’s okay. It’s going to be okay.”

Her eyes rested on him now. “Third of Five.”

Really? What _was_ with that? Surely he hadn’t gained _that_ much notoriety back in the Borg.

Then again, it was probably nothing. Drones recognized other drones, even under circumstances such as this, pretty easily.

“My name is Hugh now,” Hugh explained once more.

The girl cocked her head. “Why is… that unit… here with us?”

“To help you,” Hugh said. “Just to help you get your bearings now that the voices are gone.” He made a sweeping gesture encompassing the whole sickbay, with all the medical personnel working in it. “All these people are here to help you adjust.” He hoped it would be enough. He'd seen adult drones deactivate themselves when they learned who he was. This occurred by order of the Queen, a precaution against the chaos agent pathogen she assumed he carried. Little guilt weighed heavier.

For a moment, the girl’s placid expression shifted into a miniscule frown. “How long will that unit be assisting us?”

Hugh willed a smile onto his face. “Just until you don’t need me anymore.”

* * *

“All of them recognized me by designation,” Hugh told Seven over subspace later that day. “I mean, probably not the baby, but all the ones that can speak. It’s weird.”

Seven shrugged. It didn’t seem to be all that strange to her. Then again, she wasn’t here. She hadn’t experienced how eerie it was to be addressed that way by these kids. “Is this anything new? Everyone in the Collective knows you.”

“Surely not _everyone_.”

Seven raised an eyebrow. “Did you forget how the Collective works?”

“No, I know that. But I’ve reclaimed plenty of drones, and it’s usually not the _first_ thing they say to me.”

“You know the Queen has protocols in place for encounters with drones who left. Especially you. I’d keep an eye out for anything unusual, if I were you, but I wouldn’t worry too much.”

“Thanks, I suppose, for the advice. That isn’t actually what I’m calling you about, though.” Hugh steepled his fingers and leaned back in his desk chair. He was now going to try something Ezri had advised him to do. “I would just like to… vent. About the kids. If now is a good time.”

Seven’s eyebrow shot up once more. If the astonished expression on her face didn’t look so entirely natural, Hugh would have presumed she was messing with him. He wasn’t _that_ bad about turning to his friends for help, was he?

“You’re not interrupting anything,” Seven said. Behind her, her quarters were empty of anyone else, lit by a single desk-lamp. It had to be late in the evening there. “It’s been a slow day. Go right ahead.”

Hugh sighed and looked around his new office. It was situated near - but not too near - central Ops and as brand sparkling new as everything on the research station. Right now, it was also very empty. Not only was it sparsely furnished, it was quiet. Hugh liked a bit of peace and quiet – scratch that, Hugh pretended to like a spot of peace and quiet because humans did that. His office on the Artifact had been a dark, bleak, depressing place, but at the very least it had been in a spot that allowed most of his people to just walk in whenever they needed him. Now, Hugh felt cut off from the Reclamation Project staff here that also constituted his community in this place. A Starfleet command structure had foisted this office onto him. He wondered if he could move.

One upside to it was that it did not feel like he would be overheard in here, and could thus share his thoughts freely. It was much different than the Tal Shiar.

So he said, “It’s just a _lot_ , Seven. One of the teens has her entire mouth and throat clogged up with implants. The Starfleet medical officer says they’re not sure she’ll ever talk again. There’s a baby. Of course I’ve always known the Collective did this, but seeing it? Who assimilates a baby?”

“I know.” Seven nodded. “You’re well aware that I was six years old when I was assimilated. You were even younger.”

“Yes. But for us it was just… the new normal. It’s different seeing it happen – or _have_ happened – to someone else.” Hugh shook his head. He had more immediate problems to consider. “The medical team is still watching the kids. When they get out of sickbay, who knows what’ll happen? A few of the Starfleet crew have experience with parenting, but not nearly enough to keep up a constant babysitting shift rotation. None of the xBs, obviously.”

Most of the xBs on the staff here had been taken young, just like Hugh himself. Some few had hazy memories of families they'd had before the Borg. But after?

For most xBs, begetting children in the traditional manner, sans maturation tank, was not on the table. Some were still pursuing it – reclamation wasn’t perfect now, so perhaps one day they would get there. Hugh had never minded being sterile. He’d never particularly desired children of his own biologically, and as long as the equipment worked, what did he have to complain about?

“Hmm,” Seven said, appearing to think something over. “Would it help if I contacted some people? I still have one or two friends in Starfleet who could add their expertise to this sort of thing.”

Hugh gave her a small smile. It wasn’t much, but Seven offering to help him already made him feel less adrift – knowing there was someone out there on his side, trying to make things easier. “That’d be amazing, thank you so much.”

Seven waved it off. “It’s nothing. Would you like me to get Elnor in here now? He worries about you, you know.”

“He worries? Oh no, why? I’m fine.”

“Apparently he thinks you’re going to work yourself into the ground without him there to look after you. Having seen some of your work on the Artifact, I think he’s not wrong to worry.”

Sure, Hugh thought. And of course Seven herself was _perfectly_ unconcerned by it all. “Are you kidding?” he said. “We’re on Starfleet shifts. No one here works longer than six hours on _anything_. There are _mandated_ breaks. Replicators are free for _unlimited_ use. They have multiple recreational holodecks, and you’re sort of _expected_ to go to all the beach socials. I’m having a wholesome, healthy work regimen _forced_ upon me.”

Seven laughed, which she still rarely did. As always, Hugh felt absurdly proud of himself for causing this.

* * *

Hugh did have to admit, he felt better, somehow, working with the Starfleet shift rotation system. He and the Reclamation Project staff weren’t actually forced to, but it felt easier just to go along with what the Starfleets did. He was told that things were way more hectic on the big important spaceships, but here on the station, even if it was a highly secret project, things could be taken at a steady but not grueling pace. Hugh couldn’t help but constantly draw comparisons to the Artifact. For one, the lighting here was much brighter. The Federation seemed to like a cool blueish white these days. It made the place appear sterile, but not dreary in a way the Artifact had been. And the people here… well, some of them were distant, but yet others were obnoxiously eager (in that Starfleet way) to make friends. Where the Romulans had been harsh – a barebones veneer of teeth-clenched politeness never bothering to conceal the disgusted sneer right underneath – the Starfleets were more difficult to read. Many of them appeared outwardly friendly, but in a way that Hugh was never sure he could totally trust. Many of them were young, and wrestling with shiny if unrealistic Federation ideals clashing with a less gentle universe. Hugh elected to let them wrestle in their own time and focus on his work.

The office still was bothersome. Hugh opted to all but unofficially vacate it and set up a little temporary workstation for himself in the science labs or medical wing, wherever the work took him. It had the vast advantages of his people being able to see he was working with them and walk up to him whenever they needed something, and of making him harder to find for the Starfleet Commander.

Droves of scientists were beaming over to the Liberator every day to catalogue each and every change the Borg had made to the Starfleet ship. They weren’t pulling more drones out of stasis yet, seeing as Medical was still busy with the Borg kids. They were in a strange state, caught halfway between their pre-Borg selves and hivemind behavioral routines. Most often they were seen all together, sometimes holding each other by the hands. Occasionally they all spoke in one voice. Hugh had heard whispers from the Starfleets about “horror-holo kids”.

Of course the children couldn’t stay in the ship’s old sickbay forever. Three days after their awakening, when all initial health checks were performed on all of them, they were transported over to the station and assigned quarters. In lieu of anything approaching a nanny, and seeing as the younger kids were showing signs of fear around the xBs still, a rotation of Starfleet volunteers and Reclamation Project staff organized babysitting duties. Hugh quickly realized that trying to keep them all in one spot and out of trouble would be akin to herding cats.

Naáshala came into his office one afternoon to deliver a report whilst rocking the baby. When Hugh asked her about it, she told him that it wasn’t her turn to babysit, but no one else had been able to calm the little boy down, so she was just carrying him around the corridors for a bit. The day after that, Hugh walked into Engineering to discover one of the slightly older children there – a boy who could remember, from before the Borg, that his name was Carlos, he was eight years old, and he came from Earth, and his mother had been an engineer on “a big spaceship”. The engineering crew told Hugh that he wandered down there looking for his mother on the regular, and, being rendered a bit helpless by that whole situation, they had begun distracting him by teaching him little tidbits on how the station ran.

One sleepless night, when Hugh had been aimlessly ambling through the hallways to get the last dregs of a nightmare out of his system, he passed the mess hall and entered, vaguely planning to replicate a cup of tea and take it to the observation deck to stargaze for a few minutes, and found the mute girl there, standing motionlessly in front of a replicator, staring down at it with vacant eyes. Hugh didn’t really watch any horror-themed holonovels, and was still missing a lot of cultural context, and thus had no frame of reference to find this scary: her standing in the dark, deserted mess hall, illuminated by silvery starlight from outside the windows, in a dressing gown and long nightdress, with her shorn head and portable IV drip by her side. He only felt concern.

“Hi,” he said quietly. “Are you okay?”

The girl turned her head towards him slowly, and gave him a long, still vacant look. Hugh waited, trying to make himself look as non-threatening as possible, and wondered if she would react in any way. Her eyes were large, gray pools of nothing.

Then, almost imperceptibly, her shoulders rose and fell again, perhaps an approximation of a shrug.

“Couldn’t sleep either?” he tried.

Another moment passed. She nodded, little more than a minute lowering of her chin.

“Same here,” Hugh said. “Did you want something with the replicator?”

The mute girl lowered her eyes as if stricken, and Hugh knew immediately that he had put his foot in it.

For the children, transitioning from ingesting energy to normal food progressed way faster than it would for an adult drone. Two weeks after their awakening, some of them were already attempting to keep small amounts of solids down. But they hadn’t yet found a way to remove the implant that clogged up the mute girl’s mouth without further painful complications, and she was being nourished intravenously. It would take a while until she could have anything from the replicator. And besides…

“Oh sh- oh shoot,” Hugh said. “They’re voice-activated.”

She began to cry.

“Oh no. Oh no, I’m sorry…” Hugh raised his hands… and lowered them again. His first impulse was to gather the girl up in a hug and let her sob against his shoulder, but new xBs were often touch-averse, and he didn’t want to startle her. “It’s okay. I’m sure it’ll be okay.”

The girl turned around to face Hugh, as if to say something – and of course didn’t. She flung out her hands in frustration, tears still running down her cheeks, and it was clear what she was trying to communicate. The replicator wasn’t the only problem. She wanted to speak to him but couldn’t – wanted to envision a future of meeting for lunch with her new friends in the mess hall, chatting about normal teenaged girl things… but couldn’t. As she’d never been fully assimilated, she also couldn’t access the mind-link like the grownup xBs could. The other kids were starting to do all these things already – talk to their babysitters, have small amounts of food. It had to be painful to feel cut off from that, to feel like falling behind.

Carefully, Hugh took a step closer to her. “Listen, we can work this out. Okay? That’s exactly what me and my friends are here for, to help you with stuff like this. You won’t always have that thing in your mouth. And for the meantime, we can come up with something. We can get you a PADD to write on. Or you can learn sign language. Would you like that?”

He remembered that T’Lar and the medical research xBs had told him she might never get her voice back, even upon removing the implant. He didn’t want to give the girl false hope. But he could promise to find ways to accommodate her, however the surgeries turned out.

The girl seemed to catch on to that, and stared at her slipper-clad feet for a weighty moment, then at last responded with the smallest of nods. In wonder, Hugh watched as her skinny shoulders squared, as she reckoned with her circumstances and concluded to carry on.

His people. So resilient. So brave and amazing and utterly wondrous. He wanted to give them all the world.

“Do you want to go back to bed?” he asked instead. “I can walk you back to your room.”

But she shook her head.

“Still don’t think you can sleep? Okay then, would you like to watch the stars with me for a bit?” Hugh asked, gesturing at the windows and the panoramic view of space outside.

The girl nodded hesitantly.

Hugh got his tea and they got window seats next to each other. He could feel the girl take a deep breath in through her nose, apparently trying to relax. He did the same, and studied the stars outside. It got him thinking about constellations, that perplexing and endearing human need to perceive patterns in random specks of light, to impose their mythological heroes and beasts and… random objects onto their night sky. He wondered what it would be like to look up at the stars and spot familiar constellations, and know that here was home.

The girl tapped his shoulder, a barely-there prod with her index finger. He turned his head, raising an eyebrow in question. The girl gestured at his cup of tea and, as Hugh gave her an encouraging nod, reached out and touched the ceramic mug, feeling the warmth at her fingertips. She bent her head closer and inhaled again, taking in the calming, floral scent. Perhaps, on her face, below the metal, there was the tiniest of wistful smiles.

“That’s right,” Hugh murmured. “You’ve got plenty of senses left.”

She nudged his shoulder again, and pointed up at… his head? His brow implant? Oh, his _hair_. Then she drew her hands across her own shorn head and blinked up at him in question. She made a motion with her hands as if braiding something.

Hugh smiled at her. This, at least, was something he could definitely promise. “Yes, of course you’ll grow your hair. You’ll have braids down to your feet, if you want them.”

Again, her face shifted in that way that seemed to indicate she might be smiling.

“Do you have a name?” Hugh asked her. “One you remember from before?”

For a moment, the girl stilled again. Then, slowly, carefully, she took his hand, turned it palm up, and began tracing something, drawing patterns – drawing letters, in Federation Standard.

M, she traced. E, G.

“Meg,” Hugh said, and she nodded. “It’s nice to meet you.”

* * *

A few days later, when checking up on the kids in the evening, Hugh found them nestled in their beds with T’Lar, the Vulcan doctor, on a chair opposite from them, reading to them from a PADD resting in her lap.

“Today you are you,” she recited, in her calm, measured Vulcan voice, “That is truer than true. There is no one alive who is youer than you.”

“Old Earth children’s stories?” he asked her later, amused, when the kids were fast asleep.

“It is certainly not what I would read to my children, if I had them,” Dr. T’Lar replied. “If they were Vulcan, the eldest of them would already be instructed in the teachings of Surak. But they are not Vulcan. In fact, the majority are human. It seems only reasonable to find age-appropriate Terran literature for them. Besides, this particular story emphasizes the values of the individual self in a child-friendly manner, and was therefore a logical choice.”

Hugh wondered if she was going to find some Andorian fairytales of Yeris, the oldest boy, or dig up some Ktarian ones for the as of yet nameless little girl. He decided to inquire later.

“And you were scheduled for bedtime story duty today?” he asked instead, trying to suppress a smile. It didn’t do to laugh at Vulcans.

“I was not. But nurses Lane and K’Tek were showing clear signs of fatigue. Since I am well-rested, it was only logical for me to take over their duties temporarily.”

Hugh nodded, still valiantly fighting that grin. “A prudent decision,” he said. “But don’t overwork yourself, alright, doctor?”

“Thank you for your concern, director. I am well aware of my personal limits.” T’Lar switched off the PADD and rose to leave. “In fact, now that the children are sleeping and my task is complete, I will remove to my quarters to meditate.”

In the door, she hesitated and looked back over her shoulder at the sleeping children perhaps a tad longer than logic demanded.

“Will nurses Lane and K’Tek be indisposed much longer, do you think?” Hugh asked, finally caving in and allowing the corners of his mouth to quirk upwards.

“I am not sure why the health of my subordinates is amusing, director,” T’Lar said sternly. “I of course hope they will be restored to us at full capability very soon.” For a second, she looked down at the PADD. “Tomorrow night, we are reading _Oh The Places You’ll Go_.”

* * *

Soon enough, Hugh was way more involved with the children than he’d ever thought he would be at the onset of the project. He’d kind of hoped the nurses and babysitting volunteers would have them more or less in hand, and he in his directorial position would get to sign off on the paperwork once Starfleet picked out the names of the kids on the Liberator’s old crew manifest and found out if there was any family waiting for them out there. Alas for that.

The older ones still remembered their names, and vague impressions of their lives before. Meg remembered that her mother had worked on this very ship. Yeris, the thirteen-year-old Andorian boy, could recall his father’s name and that he’d been a bridge officer here. This meant – a quick check of the crew manifest confirmed it – that the children’s parents were here, sleeping in their alcoves. There was likely to be no one to send them back to.

The younger children had no names. No memories, no nothing. It was assumed that they had been assimilated as infants or toddlers and grown in the maturation chamber until, for some reason, the whole ship had at some point been frozen into stasis. Wolf 359 had happened more than thirty years ago; normally these children would long have matured and joined the Collective as fully-grown drones. The question of why this hadn’t happened, why the Borg had changed their MO just this once, kept Hugh up at night.

In any case, it was downright impossible to not get involved with the Borg kids. Both Yeris and eight-year-old Carlos were all over the station soon attempting to befriend the Starfleets. The baby got passed around to anyone, Starfleet personnel or xB, who had a spare moment and a bit of patience. It takes a village, Hugh supposed the ancient proverb went.

He was in his office, rocking the baby, attempting to get him to not scream, as Lieutenant Quinn, the head of the Starfleet science department, gave her updated report on the drones. There were a few minutes in which they both politely attempted to ignore the noise until Hugh gave up and decided to air his frustrations.

“Lieutenant, listen. Doctor T’Lar has fed him fifteen minutes ago. He’s in perfect health. He doesn’t need his diaper changed. Have you _any_ idea why he’s crying?”

Lieutenant Quinn shrugged. “I’m not sure. Is he… teeth? Are there teeth?”

“What? Look, he’s human, you’re human, do you have any idea… you are, aren’t you?”

Lieutenant Quinn stayed silent just a beat too long before she said, “Aha, yes. That’s me, Eva Quinn, human. Don’t know anything about babies, though. Um, maybe he’s just stressed?”

Hugh sighed, bouncing the baby on his knee. He felt a headache coming on. “What can he be stressed by? All he does is sleep, eat formula, throw up on my shirt and scream. Now me, I have no less than twenty-three subspace messages from Starfleet Command in my inbox this morning. I should be crying. Me.”

“Well, if I were this small and helpless, it’d probably stress me out,” Lieutenant Quinn opined. “I remember being that age. No way to communicate with anyone, and everything seemed to be happening all at once. Oh, maybe he wants a pacifier or something like that. That’s something human children enjoy, right?”

Hugh gestured towards the replicator. “By all means.” Did humans usually remember their infancy? Hugh certainly didn’t. Then again, he’d been assimilated very young, and didn’t even know if he was human or something else very like human.

Lieutenant Quinn replicated what looked to Hugh’s untrained eyes like a perfectly standard human pacifier and leaned over the baby with it in her hand. “Do you want this? Hmm, do you want this?”

“I don’t think he can grab things yet,” Hugh said. “Or understand you. Try just sort of… putting it in his mouth?”

Carefully, Lieutenant Quinn lowered the pacifier up to the baby’s open, screaming mouth. His jaws chomped down on it, and he began to suck furiously. Now there was silence.

“Well done, Lieutenant. Whew!” Hugh wiped some imaginary sweat off his brow.

“I’ve been thinking,” she said. “Oughtn’t someone to name the baby?”

“Hmm? Oh, certainly.” Still cradling the baby in the crook of one arm, Hugh turned back towards his paperwork.

Lieutenant Quinn checked something on her PADD. “Well, he has no name in the crew manifest. Apparently, upon assimilation, he wasn’t… born yet?”

Hugh nodded. “The Borg do that sometimes. When they assimilate a population, there’s bound to be pregnant people. They can raise a fetus in a maturation tank up from a clump of cells, basically.” He glanced back at Lieutenant Quinn, who had grown rather quiet. “Oh, don’t look at me like that. I know this sounds bad. But these are the realities of assimilation and we must confront them.”

“Seems like it.” She turned back to her PADD. “It’s going to make it difficult to trace the parents, but I wager the guess that they’re over on the ship.”

“Probably.” Hugh opened a subspace message by Admiral Thorne. Probably wanting to know how his failure of a son was getting on, Hugh thought in an uncommonly uncharitable mood.

“So about the name…”

“Got any suggestions, Lieutenant?” Mentally, Hugh was already composing his answer to the Admiral.

“You know, I always thought Esteban was a nice name.”

“Okay.” _Dear Admiral Thorne, I’m glad to announce that cooperation with the surveying Starfleet personnel has been proceeding without a hitch…_

“Okay? Just like that?”

“Why not?” Hugh spared the baby another glance. He’d stopped fussing and looked well on the way to falling asleep. _Guess you’re Esteban now._

“Well, aren’t names super important to… your people,” Lieutenant Quinn said, flagging slightly towards the end, as if growing conscious that this was in some way a lame duck of a question to be asking.

“He can’t choose an emotionally significant name for himself right now, he’s a baby,” Hugh replied. “If he wants, he can always change it later when he’s older. There are many schools of thought about xB names, you know.” He thought about the first generation of xBs – his own – to whom their own names had in many cases been something sacrosanct. There had always been outliers – people who kept their Borg designations, people who went back to names from old lives, people who had made it all a big joke, like Six. Some younger xBs cycled through names every other month, and why not express their newfound power of individual choice that way?

“That’s so cool,” Lieutenant Quinn said, grinning – later Hugh would notice that she seemed to have been responding to his unspoken thought rather than his vague-ish, verbalized statement. “How did you come by yours? Your name, I mean. Oh wait, sorry, that’s probably super personal, and you’re busy.”

With a smile and a wave of his hand at the screen in front of him, Hugh dismissed his unanswered subspace messages for the moment. “Oh no, please sit – I’m always up for telling my favorite story.”

* * *

In the evenings, with his shift almost over, Hugh would sit down and record his observations of his new patients. The medical team were puzzling over how to remove Borg implants from baby Esteban correctly, recruiting the help of xBs who had previously been medical drones – a pretty euphemism, mostly, for assimilation technicians. Yeris was already starting to correct people when they used a Borg designation for him. Little Carlos still tended to give his caretakers the slip and go wandering all over the station, with his partial exoplating and all. A science officer was starting to teach Meg Federation Standard sign language. The two as of yet nameless five-year-old girls went everywhere together, and still occasionally spoke in the same voice, although their subvocal processors had been fixed. They tended to appear here and there, often hand in hand, and give the adults aboard the station quite the spook. Even Hugh sometimes couldn’t help but flinch when they appeared surprisingly behind him…

“I’m wondering why you can’t keep these children contained,” Commander Thorne was saying.

Across the room from him, the Ktarian girl sat on the floor, curiously eyeing a stuffed animal. Starfleet officers had access to nigh-endless replicator rations, and toys for the children kept being donated and amassing in the family-sized crew quarters that were being remodeled into their little shared dormitory and playroom.

“What am I supposed to do, lock them in their room? Why? They haven’t done anything wrong,” Hugh said. “My staff and your officers are all keeping an eye on them. I’m sure it’s fine.”

“What if there’s an accident? What if they inconvenience or startle my officers?” Commander Thorne tugged at his collar. He was angling for strict, no-nonsense Officer in Charge, but there was a certain listlessness to his posture, a detached quality to his pale eyes that didn’t quite let him pull this off. “The crew needs to remain focused on their work.”

“Until we start reviving more drones, these kids _are_ the work.” Hugh pursed his lips. “Listen, Commander, Starfleet in its kindness has handed me this state-of-the-art facility, perhaps as a much belated apology for the conditions I have had to work under before. Well, not again. If I get my way, which I will, the deassimilation process for my people here will be nothing short of a fucking spa day.”

The Commander’s eyebrows rose at the unexpected rebuke, and for once, his colorless eyes met Hugh’s. Maybe for the first time, he seemed to be fully… there with him. “Your dedication to your people speaks for you, director. I… wasn’t aware there was anything to apologize for.”

Hugh sighed. “Oh, boy. Have you ever heard of a place called the Artifact?”

Before Commander Thorne could reply, they were interrupted by the Ktarian girl, who had in the meantime walked up to Hugh. She now proffered a soft Styrofoam building block for his perusal.

“Cube,” she said.

Hugh looked down at her. She had had her facial implants removed already, save for the little almost decorative ocular node and the jawline ‘spiderweb’ plug you saw on most xBs. Her natural skin tone was reasserting itself, it was the pleasant color of gleaming copper. Hugh was astonished that Commander Thorne’s heart wasn’t actively melting at the sight. “Yes, honey, it sure is.”

“Can we keep the cube?” the girl asked.

“You have to share it with your friends,” Hugh said.

The girl nodded. “We are a Collective of five now?” It had a questioning undertone.

Hugh hesitated. He could still feel Commander Thorne’s eyes on him. “Maybe,” he said slowly. “If that makes you happy. But you don’t have to listen to everything they say, or do everything they do like in a Collective. You can try… just being friends?”

She cocked her head. “That unit posits this is a valuable thing. _Just being friends.”_

“Sure.” Hugh smiled. “You know, I was a little older than you when I experienced the same change you are: waking up without the voices one day. The first lesson I learned about being an individual was about friends. They’re a wonderful thing to have, and being a friend is basically the best thing you can be.”

The girl nodded gravely. “I will confer with the others on how best to share our resources.” She walked off with the toy in her hand.

Commander Thorne was still looking at Hugh. Something in his eyes was different now, perhaps almost warmer. The Commander huffed a laugh. “They talk like little drones, huh?”

“All reclaimed xBs talk like that at first. Some say our way of speaking makes us distinct as a community. That it’s a shame to have to give it up in order to assim- to fit in with individualized societies.” Hugh gave the man a thin smile. For a second, he thought about how Seven had come back from four years on Voyager with her proudly enunciated Borg speech pattern, and how she code-switched to talking ‘normal’ nowadays as soon as never-Bs were near. “Just one opinion.”

If Thorne had noticed how he’d almost said ‘assimilate’, he didn’t comment on it. Perhaps the man wasn’t totally hopeless.

* * *

While Hugh’s days were busy as ever with his new bewildering set of duties, Ezri had at last been successful in strong-arming him into admitting daily free time into his life, the way the Starfleets mostly did, or at least preached they did. So at a certain point in the evenings, after dinner, he locked his door, put all but emergency alert on silent, turned all work-related PADDs off and banished all thoughts of work and Borg children from his mind to the best of his ability. At first he had no idea what to do with these empty hours, and spent them feeding Queenie and watching the betta swim around in her tank until he grew bored enough to go to sleep. Then, hesitantly, he started reading recreationally more often, and once the possibility of hobbies had had time to settle in, the doors were blown wide open. Maybe he could learn an instrument like so many of his friends. Maybe he could pick up a sport or get really into holonovels or knit or learn real cooking or take a page out of Geordi’s book and start assembling model ships. Maybe he could reinvent himself and have a midlife crisis. (This was presumably about the median point of his life, yes?) Maybe he could shelve the midlife crisis for now and call Elnor.

Elnor wasn’t sat in front of the viewscreen in his room as usual when he answered the call, but tucked into bed holding a PADD he must have just fished from his nightstand.

“I’m sorry, did I wake you up? Is it already night there?” Hugh asked.

“It’s not,” Elnor replied, an easy smile lightening his face. “I went to bed early.”

“Oh? Are you okay?”

“I’m fine.” Hugh heard blankets rustling as Elnor stretched, languid and entirely at ease. “I was hoping you would call.”

“You did?”

Elnor nodded. “Yes, I miss you. I also… had an idea.” He kicked the blanket off himself, exposing his body in its glorious nudity underneath.

Within Hugh’s bloodstream, the nanoprobes resigned to the call of individuality. Hugh hadn’t known he could get hard that fast anymore.

“Oh,” he breathed. “ _That_ kind of idea.”

Who had told Elnor about this kind of recreational activity? But then again, Hugh reckoned he was doing Elnor an injustice. Elnor had a wonderfully imaginative mind, and would have of course come up with this on his own.

“Yes.” Elnor blinked slowly, peering up at Hugh through dark eyes. “Do you… like it?” The hesitance in his voice was real.

Hugh couldn’t help but smile a little. “The idea or what I see?”

“Yes. Both.” Elnor smiled back, almost shyly. “I thought I could… pretend that you were here. You could pretend I was there. It might be… nice.”

Hugh licked his lips. “Yes.” The screen of the PADD was frustratingly small to view Elnor through. They would make do. “It might be nice.”

He was still fully dressed. Perhaps he ought to rectify this.

“You could lie down on your bed too,” Elnor suggested. “It’ll be a bit like I am there with you.”

“Of course. Let me just transfer you to the bedroom,” Hugh said, instructing the computer to do just this.

In his small bedroom, he quickly shucked his clothes and sat down on his bed, peering at Elnor on the bedside viewscreen. Elnor stretched luxuriantly, taking himself in hand as though there was no hurry at all. Even soft, his cock was impressive; the stories about Romulan men seemed certainly to be true. Hugh felt his mouth water as he watched Elnor tip his head back in relaxed pleasure as he gently coaxed himself to hardness.

“I wish I was there,” Hugh heard himself say. “To help you with that.”

“Mmh, yes,” Elnor replied. “You would touch me like this. You’d be gentle.”

Hugh gasped and grasped his own cock – less than gentle. But yes, if it were Elnor he was touching, he would be – so soft, so reverent. “I would… anything you want. Just tell me what it is, I’d do it.”

“Nnh.” Elnor made a small sound, almost a whimper, and squirmed a bit on the bed as he continued stroking himself. “Y- I’d want…”

He seemed to have difficulties, so Hugh decided to help him. “I would take you in my mouth – all of you, look at you. Gorgeous.”

Elnor moaned.

“Or maybe I would… mh…” Hugh felt his focus drift from his fantasies to what he could actually see on the screen: the elfin beauty of Elnor, all long limbs and graceful, slender fingers and delicately pointed ears, warmly illuminated by the light in his quarters. The tension now as he furled tighter, creeping steadily closer to orgasm, as breath left his parted lips in little sighs, as his abdominal muscles flexed involuntarily… and it was all here for Hugh to see, meant for him to observe. What a gift. What an extraordinary privilege.

Elnor’s closed eyelids twitched once, his slanted brow furrowed in concentration. “E’lev,” he sighed. “Can you… would you please talk again?”

“Whatever you want me to say,” Hugh promised.

For a moment, the movement of Elnor’s hand faltered and stilled as he gripped the base of his cock. An expression of almost embarrassment stole its way onto his face. “Could you maybe… say things about me? Nice things.”

Well, that was just cute.

“You’re so beautiful,” Hugh said. “All spread out for me. Those thighs… if I were there with you, I’d wrap them round my shoulders and just pleasure you for hours.”

“Please…” Elnor whined, his hand speeding up.

“It’s what you deserve. My lovely devoted Qalankhai deserves no less.”

“Go on…” Elnor’s eyes were scrunched shut in total focus. “Tell me… tell me…”

“What, love?” Hugh asked softly.

“Tell me I’m good. Tell me I’m good.”

_Oh_.

Hugh swallowed reflexively. His own cock was so hard he thought he must burst. He sucked in a breath, centering himself, beginning to suspect what was going on here.

“You’re doing amazing,” he said. “My wonderful… steadfast Qalankhai. I couldn’t wish for better.”

A broken little sound left Elnor’s mouth. Yes. This right there. Bullseye.

“You’re so good, so good for me,” Hugh breathed as he caught some of his own precum in his palm and spread it down the length of his shaft to ease his hand’s slide. “The way you protect me. I never want to be oathbound to anyone else. It means… so much, so much to have you by my side.”

Elnor keened. “Ahh… Hugh…”

It was like a jolt, like something golden and liquid and hot coursing through Hugh’s chest. There would never be anything more affirming – especially in a moment like this – than hearing his given name. He was so close now it hurt. “Yes. You… you know just what I need, don’t you? Y-you take care of me so well. I-I adore you, and I…” It was hard to stay coherent, when his mind was a constant litany of _I need to come, I have to come, please let me come_. Elnor was making little whines now, his head thrown back onto his pillow, his mouth slack with pleasure, his face glowing with it. And Hugh had to bring him over the brink.

“I’ll always need you,” he breathed. “I _need_ you.”

Elnor made an indescribable noise and came, and Hugh watched him uncoil and surrender to the outpouring of sensation and it was so beautiful, so enrapturing that his own orgasm quite surprised him.

When it was all said and done, and they were both lying boneless and hazy with afterglow on their respective beds, sharing glances and whispers of sweet nothings, Hugh’s counselling brain, as if from far away, wondered for a moment at what a strange thing this was for Elnor to get off to, and if he should be a tad worried. But the rest of him was tired, and he could always think about it later.

* * *

The morning after that, Hugh got up and started his day as usual, with a little smile of satisfaction on his lips. He’d worried that staying apart physically would not be satisfactory for him and Elnor, but this new little addition to their correspondence dispelled some of his worries. This was nice, it was novel and exciting and would certainly keep them entertained for a while.

He had a quick breakfast and took his morning coffee out to his office, making the rounds and checking up on the various medical and science teams on his way there. Nothing worrisome had happened during the night. There seemed to be a shift occurring in the structure of the teams: while the Reclamation Project volunteers and the Starfleet officers had kept to themselves in the beginning, they were beginning to intermingle and even bond. Projects were cross-referenced and examined together, and, stopping by the mess hall, Hugh could even see some xBs and Starfleet uniforms having breakfast together, talking animatedly about the work and their various fields of expertise. He smiled, also, at that. Maybe in a few months’ time, they’d be a proper blended crew.

In his office, the usual slog of unopened subspace missives waited. There was a steady back-and-forth with Starfleet over the various resources he’d hurriedly asked for which they’d need for the children. Requisitioning personnel on such short notice was a real problem, what with the top secret nature of the project and its Borg affiliation. It was not exactly a posting people clamored for. Hugh was well used to having trouble finding staffers for the Reclamation Project, but the Federation was being put suddenly in a bind, and floundering quite badly. And, in a cosmic bout of injustice, it was him they chose to unload their frustrations on, rather than the Commander who had caused the whole mess.

There was a message from Seven, at least, promising that she would call on her Voyager family and ask if anyone was able to pull some strings with Starfleet for him.

Hugh’s reading was interrupted when his comm-badge beeped. He still had not grown used to wearing one, as though he was a Starfleet member or something like that.

“Thorne to Director Hugh.”

Wearily, he tapped his badge. “Yes.”

“Director, there is a shuttle asking to dock. The pilot says they’re here to see you.” Thorne sounded consternated – he certainly hadn’t planned for a lot of unscheduled visits to the secret space station; not that Hugh had planned that either.

“Huh,” he said. “Tell whoever it is I’ll be right there.”

He got up and made the short trip from the office to Central Ops. On his way, he wondered who would call on him out of the blue like that. Surely not Seven? She would have announced her intention to come, probably. And it couldn’t be whoever Seven had promised to contact already.

In Ops, Commander Thorne greeted Hugh with the kind of look that commanding officers sometimes got and which promised consequences later. They were of equal rank, so Hugh just shrugged.

“What have we got?” he asked.

“I’m not sure. But it seems to be one of your people.”

“Oh, my people?”

“The shuttle is hailing again,” the officer at the Ops console announced.

Commander Thorne waved a hand. “Yes, yes, put them on screen.”

The large viewscreen mounted to the wall of the room lit up, and Hugh was greeted by the megawatt grin of Six of Nine.

“Hi, everyone!” Six waved. All Hugh could really do was stare.

“Six. What in the name of Omega are you doing here?”

“I heard you were feeling a little lonesome out here,” Six said. “And so I thought I’d come by and drop you a gift!”

A gift? What could that be, Hugh wondered. Another mixtape? But surely Six could have simply sent him that on subspace instead of coming here in person.

“It’s not another mixtape,” Six said, reminding Hugh that they seemed to be in close enough proximity now to read minds. Six turned his head to look at something at the back of the shuttle. “You can come out now. Surprise!”

“Hi, Hugh,” said Geordi. “I thought it was time we really talked.”


End file.
